China announces new carbon-intensive projects

China announced scores of new carbon-intensive coal and steel projects in the first half of 2021, research showed on Friday just days after a key U.N. report urged immediate global action to curb use of fossil fuels and prevent runaway climate change.

The push comes as climate experts exhort governments around the world to take drastic action amid increasingly widespread extreme weather events, like deadly wildfires, drought and even central China's highest rainfall in 1,000 events that experts say are directly linked to human impact on the environment via carbon emissions.

"The rest of the world is getting the message that it's time to move away from coal, but coal interests in China are dragging their feet, and the central government is not reining them in," said Christine Shearer, coal programme director at Global Energy Monitor (GEM), the US think-tank that jointly authored the report on China's first-half carbon projects with the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

During the first half, China, the world's biggest coal consumer and source of climate-warming greenhouse gases, announced plans to build 18 new coal-fired blast furnaces, more than in the whole of last year, according to the CREA-GEM research.

China has promised to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2060, but faces growing calls to set more ambitious targets and act faster.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a nearly 4,000-page report this week that climate change had "affected every inhabited region across the globe" and was in danger of spiralling out of control.